Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
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Me, thinking about the days of dial up:
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Yes totally. I mean there are the same people just with an age/experience gap.
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I feel that. I spend a lot of time doing stuff for myself (playing games, watching videos, and some doom scrolling), but I keep telling myself it's because it's inconsistent in frequency and duration.
But at the end of the day, it's largely an excuse. I contributed to Lemmy a bit when I switched, and I could totally find a few hours a week to help with something. I just don't, because it's always a tradeoff with other things I'd like to do, some of them also productive.
So I guess we'll see what I do. In the next 5 years, my kids will be transitioning to being more independent, and I'll have more and more time available. My current plan is to get more involved in FOSS, but we'll see if I actually do.
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Dzzzz rrrrr bidibidibippbip KRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR...
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Time to program the ESP8266
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Hence the power of the shout "sudo rm -rf*"!
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Wait until you hear about space age technology!
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That's a looooot of assumptions and stale assumptions at that.
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I totally agree, but nobody is saying everyone that uses a computer is a tech wiz. I'm saying there are still plenty of people today interested in digging in deeper just like there were back then. Tech being more accessible today hasn't led to a decrease in such things, because the people the ease brought in wouldn't have dug in in the past.
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Hah. I was just playing a YT video of modem sounds for my son, after showing him some "history" videos about early PCs, BBS's, text adventure and early commodore* and PC gaming.
History? I lived it, son.
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FOSS RO DAH
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My wife actually used that for something she needed to be able to remote control a few years back. She tells me it an amazing chip.
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I've noticed that a lot in newer users.
Even in technical fields, the users know how to use the software but they don't understand anything under that. A lot of people got into computer via smartphones where you are essentially locked out of anything below the application layer.
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Wow cool!
Yes it's one of the most cheapest and amazing chips but also not very known about, or so I feel.
I made a little webserver on it that polled a site I had, so that I could switch (ok, only a led but still) on and off both from the esp and the website. Quite capable little chip.
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No, it's recognizing that tinkering means different things now.
In the 80s and 90s, if you were learning computers you had no choice but to understand how the physical machine worked and how software interacted with it. Understanding the operating system, and scripting was required for essentially any task that wasn't in the narrow collection of tasks where there was commercial software. There was essentially one path (or a bunch of paths that were closely related to each other) for people interested in computers.
That just isn't the case now. There are more options available and many (most?) of them are built on top of software that abstracts away the underlying complexity. Now, a person can use technology and never need to understand how it works. Smartphones are an excellent example of this. People learn to use iOS or Android without ever knowing how it works, they deal with the abstractions instead of the underlying bits that were used to create it.
For example, If you want to play games, you press a button in Steam and it installs. If you want to stream your gaming session to millions of people, you install OBS and enter your Twitch credentials. You don't need to understand graphical pipelines, codecs, networking, load balancing, or worry about creating client-side applications for your users. Everything is already created for you.
There are more options available in technology and it is completely expected that people distribute themselves amongst those options.
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I really think it has led to a reduction in the rate at which otherwise average people wind up in tech because they like it, as opposed to for money.
In other words, the computing hobby has declined from its heyday in the 80's-early 00s. Most people who build their own PC now can do so with about 10 minutes of help from YouTube and tools like PCPartsPicker, which helps a lot with accessibility, but the trade off is that the people who get into computers now don't need to spend as much time on them to get into them. They don't need to build up as much foundational knowledge, so now that knowledge has become rarer, even within e.g. the indie PC gaming hobby.
You can literally make an entire video game without writing any code. This is phenomenal if you want to make games easily, but it also gives coding a level of inaccessibility even in the minds of people getting into making video games that didn't use to exist because they came as a package deal.
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And what is the problem with that?
I mean, it sounds as if that is a bad thing that people are dedicating their free time at the betterment of something that can be used freely by everyone, including you
If you want others (different color, sex, gender, race, abilities, sexual preferences) to have a bigger part of that pie, then have more of them jump in.
I am guessing that most of the greybeards are here doing this because they can, abs like it. Help others to he able to help out
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Greybeards can be found in lots of places, but definitely not on discord.
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But plenty of people still do learn the deeper stuff. Just because you can write a game without code doesn't mean everyone who makes games is doing it without code.
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Nobody here was arguing that they don't. It's just that computing as a hobby is far more niche than it used to be. Literally everyone who used a computer used to have to be able to troubleshoot issues on their own with nothing but a manual and the machine itself. If they didn't figure it out, they'd ask a friend who would teach them how to fix it in the future and they just had to remember or they were SOL. You don't have to do that anymore, so those kinds of skills are less common than they were for prior generations.
I'm not saying young people with those skills don't exist anymore. I know they do. I'm a senior software engineer and have mentored some of them. I'm trying to talk about the rate at which fundamental computer knowledge and troubleshooting skills are being acquired, not if they are at all.
Please, don't put words in my mouth.
